He sat up in a start. His torturous dreams suddenly done, it was time to make his escape. His cellmates choked and snorted - dying or sleeping - it mattered little. The skinny one stared ashen out the window as if his redemption would fly down from the heavens to greet him. Don knew better.
His eyes darted from the cell to the hallway. His keepers weren't standing guard today. His eyebrows lit up with anticipation. The opportunity to escape beckoned to him. He could leave this torture chamber behind.
He got up from his bunk and tread uneasily, waveringly, to the cell door. It stood open! Very slowly he sneaked a glance down the hall and then up the other direction. The night was still, save for a murmur far up the hall and in the guard center. Bags of refuse were scattered about. Perhaps the guards were changing shift. Don didn’t care, his torturers could only kill him now - he was beyond pain.
Uneasily he staggered down the hall away from the murmur. The effort was exhausting, but he set his jaws and picked up each weary limb and forced his way through the agony to the end of the hall. A red flame flicked it’s notice of the way out. Each step powered the next, but the hallway seemed endless.
The stale smell of death filled his nostrils and made him gag.
There was the end. The hall broke in two - one this way, the other away. Cell after cell stretched down the halls full of snorting, rasping dying. Which way would get out? Behind him was the sound of shoes padding against stone. The murmuring had stopped? No time to think - he pushed on hoping he’d taken the right path.
The gate stood before him in the dusky dark. A sign was above, but almost invisible in the gloom. Here was the portal, in or out, he couldn’t be sure, lack of certainty was his only clear thought. Everything else was a jumble of sound, within or without, it was impossible to tell. The uncertain gate looked final. There was nothing behind, only the gate was hiding beyond.
The crossbar seemed to pop the gate open. It pulled him through to a smooth path bounded by shrubs and grass. The muffled voices and hurried footstep behind compelled the Don to hurry across the grassy expanse. Above a dim moon fairly glowed behind a hazy sky. The glow of lights all around gave the sky a dull grey to its milky mist. Beyond the grass was a dark lined plain of gleaming metal cocoons with reflective glass smearing the light from the painful panels suspended above.
The Don stumbled amongst the shining metal forms, his robe billowed around him as he felt his muscles and tendons straining against the atrophy of timeless inertia. His gnarled hands guided him from one metal shell to the next, he could feel the dribble dripping from the corners of his mouth, the dried moisture over his eyes. He vowed to find some water and wipe the past off his face.
Ahead lay some trees and another path of flat white concrete - beyond that a wide street. Dimly he began to remember these machines using wide, vast boulevards of tar to speed their occupants from one part of this endless city to another. He could remember sitting in the comfortable cabins of these machines, listening to endless tales of political intrigue and economic counsel. How many false stories were repeated with authority to his disinterested ear in those many expeditions?
The Don could vaguely remember how slow anger had brewed in the many hours he pushed through those crowds of machines every day. The memory of that deepening anger stirred him forward.
"Not again, I’ll be free or die", he vowed, gritting his teeth.
